Morality bites

Mustering Some Sympathy For The Bedeviled Ham And Beef

What I feared most was the screaming. Desperate cries from a freaked-out pig might ruin bacon for me forever.

I'd spent the previous two days hanging out with happy hogs at the idyllic Newman Farm on the Arkansas-Missouri border. I watched them trot around the fields, wag their curly tails and flop in pools of mud. I even held one in my hands when it was only a few hours old.

But here I'd come, five hours across Missouri to Trimble, just outside Kansas City, Mo., to witness the other end of a pig's life cycle. Comfortingly, the place was called Paradise Meat Locker.

So why was I here? I asked myself the same question as I nervously pulled on shoe guards, tucked my hair in a shower cap and snapped up my lab coat right outside the kill floor door. I didn't want to see a pig get killed. Heck, I don't think anyone does.

But I felt like I couldn't continue eating meat if I didn't. So this summer I embarked on an unpleasant pilgrimage to bear witness to the death of every kind of animal I ate. And in some cases, to kill the animal myself.

Before you start with the angry letters, please hear me out. We're probably more similar than you think. Like most of you reading this story, I love animals. I love to pet them. And I love to hold them.

But I also love to eat them.

So the thought of their execution -- something my appetites demand -- both frightened and revolted me.

But if I couldn't take the reality of what was on my plate, how could I justify eating it? And how could I feed it to my kids?

I'd been asking myself this for years, but urban life made it easy to avoid the issue. Meat here comes in manicured cuts covered with shiny plastic. It doesn't have a face (as long as you avoid those ghastly ethnic markets) and certainly doesn't make noise. It's easy to imagine that these cuts come from the rib machine or the chicken tender factory or even the brisket dispenser down the street.

But after reading Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" (2006) in which he personally kills and forages his dinner, I found it harder to tune out the question. My own foodie concerns about the provenance of my meat drove my curiosity further. But the biggest factor was my conviction that it's wrong to ask someone to do something for you that you morally could not do yourself.

This plan felt very personal, but in doing it, I was actually joining a blooming movement of ethical meat eaters. Cool, conscientious folks who used to slump guiltily next to their righteous vegan friends, knowing they were baddies for eating factory-farmed animals, but not seeing much choice.

Today, however, many proudly proclaim their meat love -- especially for pork -- with the near-virtuousness of vegetarians. That's because ethical meat options have expanded faster than you can say "ex-vegetarian." Between 2002 and 2007 U.S. organic meat sales grew tenfold (from $33 million to $364 million), according to Chicago-based Mintel research group.

This doesn't even count the sales growth in meats that are free-range, grass-fed and natural -- less restrictive standards than organic, in which livestock is required by the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture to have been fed organic feed and be free of hormones and antibiotics.

The new options have even partially lured vegetarians to the carnivore camp. While no one keeps figures on such things, anecdotal converts include Mollie Katzen, author of "Moosewood Cookbook," and Amy Standen and Sasha Wizansky, founders of Meatpaper magazine, a young quarterly examining the recent "fleisch geist," the trendy term for the new "meat consciousness."

Although watching an actual slaughter lies at the far end of the ethical meat-eating spectrum, a growing number of foodies and chefs are embracing the challenge as a political, environmental and moral exercise.

Anecdotally, Pollan's book pushed many into the killing-and-flesh-eating camp. But mostly, it got them thinking about what it means.

"There were several people I heard from who were inspired to try killing their own meat, and several others who became lapsed vegetarians," Pollan told me. "The book seemed to create a certain number of new vegetarians and a certain number of new carnivores, which gratifies me -- that people would have used the same information to come to such diametrically opposed conclusions."

In the name of conscious cooking, some chefs are proudly raising and slaughtering the animals themselves. Chris Cosentino, of Incanto in San Francisco, who has personally slaughtered dozens of animals and writes about it at offalgood.com, leads the movement in the U.S. while Jamie Oliver (who slaughtered a chicken in front of a TV audience this year) is at the forefront in England. Both have earned praise, but also a fair share of death threats.